Despite the coming availability of a new generation of Sandy Bridge desktop CPUs suitable for advancing Apple's Mac Pro line, the company has reportedly been evaluating whether to continue to invest in furthering its full-sized workstation line beyond this year in the face of limited sales.

Although the Mac maker has reportedly developed a revision to the existing Mac Pro that may or may not see the light of day, people familiar with the matter said management as far back as May of 2011 were in limbo over whether to pour any additional resources into the product line.

According to these people, the consensus among sales executives for the Cupertino-based company was that the Mac Pro's days -- at least in its current form -- were inevitably numbered. In particular, internal discussions were said to focus around the fact that sales of the high-end workstations to both consumers and enterprises have dropped off so considerably that the Mac Pro is no longer a particularly profitable operation for Apple.

Another point reportedly raised during the discussions was that the advent of Apple's multi-use, high-speed Thunderbolt technology will ultimately allow other, more popular members of the Mac product family to assume the vast majority of the roles that once required the Mac Pro's and flexibility and architecture.

As it stands, notebooks currently make up a 74 percent share of the Apple's computer sales, according to sales figures and comments made by chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer in the company's latest quarterly earnings conference call this month.

Quarterly Mac sales just set an all time record of 4.89 million units; the company noted that while desktops are an increasingly small proportion of overall sales, there were still record sales of desktops, represented primarily by the iMac.

At the same time, Apple made no comment of the sales or future of its Mac Pro line of full sized desktop systems, the only machines it continues to sell with internal PCI Express expansion slots. However, over the last year Apple has deployed Thunderbolt to all of its notebooks, iMac and the Mac mini. Thunderbolt provides the same signals as PCI Express slots over a high speed external interconnect.

Armed with Thunderbolt, Apple's notebooks and consumer desktops can accommodate fast external storage, multiple external displays and specialized peripheral devices, even connect to external housings that supply conventional PCI Express slots for expansion cards, negating one of the primary unique features of the Mac Pro.

Apple's existing iMac and Mac mini designs can't accommodate the fastest, high end processors and graphics that the Mac Pro can, but there appears to be an increasingly limited market for high end desktops, particularly in comparison to the mass market sales Apple is seeing with its iOS devices like the iPad (which now outnumbers all Mac sales combined), as well as the company's more consumer-oriented notebook and desktop Macs.

Apple could choose to offer a new high-end iMac or beefed up Mac mini that packs enough power to approach the performance current Mac Pro, greatly simplifying its product lineup while having a very limited impact on sales. That would save the company the efforts of having to design and maintain a tower system.

Several months ago, Apple began to retreat slightly on its Mac Pro sales efforts when it ceased regular shipments of the $4,999 12-core to channel partners. Only a handful of the company's U.S.-based authorized resellers continue to list the product as a special order item, while others have pulled the configuration from their product database entirely. Those who have kept the model in their systems, like Amazon, have for months listed the configuration as "currently unavailable," advising customers that it doesn't "know when or if this item will be back in stock."

Selling what people buy

A year ago, the company similarly abandoned sales of the Xserve in response to limited sales, after first backing away from the server market by discounting the Xserve RAID.

Apple has since recommended the Mac Pro as an alternative to the Xserve, but has also introduced a limited duty server model of the Mac mini. This summer, Apple released Mac OS X Lion Server as a $50 package in the Mac App Store, signaling an intent to continue its server product but aim it at a "prosumer" home/office audience, with easier to configure software that lacks some of the previous version's sophistication and complexity.

As AppleInsider exclusively reported during the sum mer of 2010, the company similarly retargeted its high end Final Cut Pro to serve a more mass market prosumer audience, allowing it to add major architectural improvements to the software while making it more approachable and more affordable to the mainstream pool of customers who were actually buying it.

They need something more powerful than the Mac Mini but screen-less unlike the iMac. However, the Mac Pro is and has been a boat anchor. I mean seriously, that thing is unwieldy. No need for a huge hunk of aluminum like that in this day & age. I cringe whenever I have to deploy or service one.

Why can't they utilize their expertise in ventilation and produce a fast thin octo-core unit that can stand upright if needed, and be turned on its side for rack mounting to replace the XServe? This rumor has been going around for a while and made so much sense that I am shocked to learn it might now not be happening.

If it didn't cost more than a third-world Kidney transplant, I'm guessing more people would be mac pros.

I never understood why they couldn't sell it as an infinitely upgradeable tower with cheaper starting components to make it a more affordable computer, sometimes people don't need everything that the desktop tower has to offer to want one.

If it didn't cost more than a third-world Kidney transplant, I'm guessing more people would be mac pros.

I never understood why they couldn't sell it as an infinitely upgradeable tower with cheaper starting components to make it a more affordable computer, sometimes people don't need everything that the desktop tower has to offer to want one.

The vast majority of people just don't need them. The pro laptops and upper end iMacs have more power than all but the most demanding video editors might need. They run basically any video game well too. Still, there's no question the Mac Pro provides power that high end prosumers and professionals can't get elsewhere on the Mac platform.

I can only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow doesn't look good either.

I really like the power and expansion capabilities of a tower, but the current price to substantially exceed the performance of a top of line iMac is $6000++, the gap in price seems enormous for modest albeit significant performance differences. I suspect a lot of Pro users find the top end iMac to be pretty darn good.

My guess my next machine will be a top end iMac.

If you need 3-4 displays, custom super performance graphics cards, and high speed internal bus, as well as custom cards, e.g., audio or signal processing, then a PRo is needed.

Not sure anybody really makes a business of the top top end machines, but Apple probably does not want to loose that influential market, especially in sciences and movie industry.

I wonder if Apple would license the OS on a few blades that might provide the high performance needs at minimum costs?

If it didn't cost more than a third-world Kidney transplant, I'm guessing more people would be mac pros.

I never understood why they couldn't sell it as an infinitely upgradeable tower with cheaper starting components to make it a more affordable computer, sometimes people don't need everything that the desktop tower has to offer to want one.

Because Apple never has and never will support just any piece of hardware you can buy off newegg. Even the stuff you can put in Mac Pros have to be specific models, if not even specific manufacturers (although that last part I'm not sure about). Letting you upgrade everything and anything to whatever would be too much overhead to be worth it to Apple.

I have a Mac Pro, but haven't done much to it other than add more hard drive space and memory since I bought it 3-1/2 years ago. (or was it 2-1/2??)

Part of it is that Apple seems to have done little to upgrade it other than incremental bits.

Not sure what it would take to make me upgrade it, but as it stands, it's super powerful to catalog photos, log my extra big iTunes library, and serve it's main purpose of home music recording/hooking up to a variety of instruments via USB/MIDI interfaces or FireWire.

Maybe the reason for limited sales is that many people, like me, have been waiting for a decent refresh. I would buy a refreshed/updated Mac Pro as soon as it came out. I have been waiting for quite a long time.

The main reason I want a Mac Pro is I want to attach 2 large NON-GLOSSY monitors to my Mac.

This has been my feeling too that they are slowly abandoning the high-end market, and the trend shows it. I do a bit of 3D work, so multiple cores are really ideal. But I had been contemplating going to the PC more and more for this kind of work. It's unfortunate since I love working on the Mac.

I really like the power and expansion capabilities of a tower, but the current price to substantially exceed the performance of a top of line iMac is $6000++, the gap in price seems enormous for modest albeit significant performance differences. I suspect a lot of Pro users find the top end iMac to be pretty darn good.

My guess my next machine will be a top end iMac.

If you need 3-4 displays, custom super performance graphics cards, and high speed internal bus, as well as custom cards, e.g., audio or signal processing, then a PRo is needed.

Not sure anybody really makes a business of the top top end machines, but Apple probably does not want to loose that influential market, especially in sciences and movie industry.

I wonder if Apple would license the OS on a few blades that might provide the high performance needs at minimum costs?

Can you help satisfy my own curiosity? Did you expand your own Mac Pro? If so, in what way? Did you add additional video cards? More disk drives? I'm curious as to how many people might have bought a Pro - just in case, but no case as arisen for the need to expand.

They need something more powerful than the Mac Mini but screen-less unlike the iMac. However, the Mac Pro is and has been a boat anchor. I mean seriously, that thing is unwieldy. No need for a huge hunk of aluminum like that in this day & age. I cringe whenever I have to deploy or service one.

Why can't they utilize their expertise in ventilation and produce a fast thin octo-core unit that can stand upright if needed, and be turned on its side for rack mounting to replace the XServe? This rumor has been going around for a while and made so much sense that I am shocked to learn it might now not be happening.

Totally agree with you. Apple could just rebrand the Mac Mini and scale it from low- to high-end box and have it all covered. A slightly bigger Mac Mini-style enclosure (maybe taller) that has user-accessible internals/slots with Mac Pro-like specs would be a killer product and probably a lot cheaper to produce and sell than the Mac Pros. And hell, with Thunderbolt, you could, in theory, eliminate a lot of the internal accessibility for upgrades and expansion demanded by high-end users.

Obviously, I'm just talking out of my butt here, but it seems like a great direction for Apple to go and to further simplify their line-up (something that has always worked out well for them.) The low-end Mac Minis would be there for cost-conscious users, iMacs for casual and home business types, and this theoretical headless Mini/Pro hybrid would fill the high-end without all the drawbacks of the current Mac Pros.

I am in the market for one. They last a long time so I always buy the top of the line. Just waiting for the TB equipped version. I hope they make at least one more version.

Where else are you going to get 12 cores and 64 gigs of ram? With that much power you really need the larger enclosure just for the fans.

The expansion slots are pretty cool too. I have used two so far.

Sure with TB you can access external storage from an iMac so the 4 bays are no longer necessary but the other stuff I really like. I have the dual super drives which are not that necessary, but I like that they are not slot loading and the front facing i/o ports are really convenient.

There are some issues with claiming that a single Thunderbolt connection is enough to completely replace a Mac Pro:

1) Thunderbolt provides less bus power than Firewire and USB. The people who are praising Thunderbolt for reducing cable "spaghetti" are forgetting about all the external boxes, power cords and bricks required by all these external devices, especially high powered PCI Express cards.

2) While Thunderbolt's current 10 gigabits per second speed seems impressive for a single connector, it does not come close to accommodating the aggregate bandwidth of a fully loaded Mac Pro with all PCI Express slots in use.

3) Thunderbolt integrates basic DisplayPort support, but the actual DisplayPort standard is outpacing what is currently built into Thunderbolt. For example, DisplayPort 1.2 supports higher bandwidth than Thunderbolt today. Does Thunderbolt support daisy chaining multiple DisplayPort monitors?

I'm one of the people who no longer needs one of these beasts thanks to fast yet cheap external storage. I'd been buying giant towers since the days of the Quadra, then a beige G3 (anybody remember that one?) then the first blue G4. Then the Graphite G4. I held on to that one for quite a while since it was the last Mac that could run OS 9 natively. Rather than buy a Mac Pro, I bought a Mini and lots of external storage.

I realize there are many high end buyers who will hate seeing the end of what we know as being a Mac Pro, but it's time.

If it didn't cost more than a third-world Kidney transplant, I'm guessing more people would be mac pros.

Exactly! It is like Apple doesn't understand what most people need or want in a desktop.

Quote:

I never understood why they couldn't sell it as an infinitely upgradeable tower with cheaper starting components to make it a more affordable computer, sometimes people don't need everything that the desktop tower has to offer to want one.

They could but they are tied to their old marketing beliefs. The current desktop lineup is of their own making and frankly it is like they don't have the maturity to let go.

I love my Mac pro at work... I took advantage of The possibility of adding four drives which is very useful...

The other advantage is that they support huge amounts of ram and I could eventually upgrade the tax card

but I do think the form factor is too much for most needs

If apple took the highest specced iMacs and place them in a tower that allowed for two 2.5 drives, four 3.5 drives and support for more ram then these machines would be welcome in many studios again... The 27" iMacs r great but I'd rather have to invest once in a good monitor every five years rather than a completely new machine every three

Also when things go wrong with an iMac... They go spectacularly wrong... With my Mac pro I can quickly remove the hdds and use them on another machine or replace them myself... The iMac ha to be taken for servicing...

It's the nicest tower PC on the market by far, but clearly its days were numbered. The case hasn't been overhauled in over 8 years, and Apple has slowly been replacing or discontinuing all of its other professional grade stuff.

Apple could offer a smaller tower with a double wide x16 PCie and a 8x PCie, 2hard drive bays... They can drop the use of the large size memory and come up with something half the size well equipped and a third of the weight that would make it cheaper to transport....
The iMac is a really nice machine but lack that hard drive & PCie expansion and support for high end video cards.
I was still waiting for the next version of it with the sandy bridge and thunderbolt... They had prototypes for a smaller form factor but I guess wasn't that chick*

It's an interesting crossroads. I would love to be a fly on the wall at Apple high-level strategy sessions. Conventional wisdom used to be that if you wanted to court developers you had to make sure Mac development hardware and software was available. Not sure to what extent that is still true. I would feel better knowing that such a tool continues to exist for those who want or need it.

On the other hand, one of things that distinguishes Apple is that it has always been bold in seizing future trends with both hands and not looking back--for better or worse. Mostly better. The other thing that Steve brought when he returned was a narrowed focus--jettisoning lines instead of accumulating them like so much moss. If Apple has a bold plan for the future that doesn't include heavy iron, I'm interested in seeing where it's going.

Remember Steve's truck analogy. Maybe Apple doesn't see the truck market as a part of its future.

mac pros are very important for a market share. If they discontinue it they will lose apple customers. Myself, i'm an avid gamer, and to me the mac pro is the only viable option. other macs are bargan computers that lack future proofing for gaming and don't have the performance of a mac pro either. If i have to get an imac with a mobile GPU in it to game, i'm gonna have to go the hackintosh route istead so i can keep my high end hardware.

They might be thinking sales of Mac Pros make people refresh their Macs less frequently, and they'd be right. I bought an 8-core Mac Pro a year ago. I need it for working with heavy plugins and large images in Photoshop, as well as the odd music recording project every now and then. I probably could have made due with an iMac at the time - but I bought a Pro for the expansion options, since it supports 4 HDs and 64GBs of RAM and also has room for expansion slots to put in special DSP-cards if I need to, or an extra graphics card. I bought the Pro because I'm hoping it'll last 6-10 years with me upgrading a component here and there along the way. If most people put an extra $500-$1000 into their Mac and then ended up only needing a new one every 10 years or even less frequently, then that wouldn't be very good business for Apple.

They need something more powerful than the Mac Mini but screen-less unlike the iMac. However, the Mac Pro is and has been a boat anchor. I mean seriously, that thing is unwieldy. No need for a huge hunk of aluminum like that in this day & age. I cringe whenever I have to deploy or service one.

Why can't they utilize their expertise in ventilation and produce a fast thin octo-core unit that can stand upright if needed, and be turned on its side for rack mounting to replace the XServe? This rumor has been going around for a while and made so much sense that I am shocked to learn it might now not be happening.

Replacing the Xserve requires more than just a rackmount form factor. The Xserve also had:
Dual hot swap power supplies.
Hot swappable hard drives.
Hardware monitoring and sensors: You could check status of the Xserve's fans, power supply, and system temperatures from Apple's Server Manager application.
Lights out management: You can remotely power up or hard shutdown the Xserve even if the Mac OS is not working-- you dont' need to drive to the server room just to hold down the power button.

The sales of the Mac Pros suck because they don't put enough effort into making it a desireable product.

I disagree. The real problem is that technology has changed. Towers were needed for their PCI slots and internal drive speeds (it was about speed rather than merely the ability to house the drives internally). My Pro Tools rig used to eat up four PCI slots and its own internal hard drive. Now, it just needs a firewire port (for the audio I/O), a USB port (for that frigging iLok dongle) and a few external drives (including backups).

What does one need a giant tower for that can't be better handled by external gear? The only thing a Mac Pro has going for it is processing power and RAM. Put that in a Mac Mini Pro.

Does XGrid still exist ? Is it capable of linking minis over thunderbolt for parallel processing ?
To me, XGrid, or some future iteration of such, would be ideal for those who need more power.
I figure the limiting factor is the current top speed of Thunderbolt, for both intercommunication and for external PCI cards (I'm under the impression that Thunderbolt doesn't use many lanes and that video cards do ... )

Personally if i had the need and the money I would prefer to have the simple and elegant Mac Pro over a few minis and multiple external boxes ....

mac pros are very important for a market share. If they discontinue it they will lose apple customers. Myself, i'm an avid gamer, and to me the mac pro is the only viable option. other macs are bargan computers that lack future proofing for gaming and don't have the performance of a mac pro either. If i have to get an imac with a mobile GPU in it to game, i'm gonna have to go the hackintosh route istead so i can keep my high end hardware.

Same for me. At home, I depend on a Penryn Mac Pro. It served me well so far and is going to continue doing so for an other 4 years. If they discontinue the line, I will have to leave Apple and go back to the PC world. I don't want a laptop with a 27" screen. I want a tower that I can upgrade as time goes. I'm a gamer and a music producer and I need what's inside this "boat anchor". Yes, it's heavy. So what! It'd a desktop, it's not supposed to be moved around anyway.

To those of you saying that thunderbolt is equivalent to PCI-e, please, stop spreading lies. It might be the same signal but it's not the same bandwidth. You can get 8 GBps on a 16x 2.0 slot and there is now 4 of those on modern motherboards. We will soon get PCI-e 3.0 which will double that number. So, until we get 3 or 4 thunderbolt ports on a MacBook Pro, I won't be interested. Just one is far from being enough to replace the adaptability of a Mac Pro.

The Mac Pro is the "Kwisatz Haderach" of all computers, and Apple is considering its relevance as a viable product. Come on Steve enforce your will in the after life! Make them not just continue it but make it better, faster, stronger!

They need something more powerful than the Mac Mini but screen-less unlike the iMac.

Do they? Your opinion says yes. But the facts may say no.

I work for a studio level FX/Annie house and last year we replaced 20 aging Pro based workstations with iMacs and have had no issues. We are replacing the other 30 with iMacs over the next six months. We have a mac mini server running our email. We also have four workstations running a Linux based rendering system. If we could get Mac minis that could handle that load we would.